Birth and development of the espresso coffee

Mar 6
07:35

2009

Michele De Capitani

Michele De Capitani

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The coffee break is since always a real blessing for every worker. It helps you to relax, to have a good chat with the colleagues and maybe also to snack.

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Coffee is since centuries one of Italians’ most favorite beverages. As tea is considered the typical English people drink,Birth and development of the espresso coffee Articles also thanks to the famous teatime, Italians are famous in the world to drink the espresso. Espresso coffee is a concentrated coffee beverage obtained by the roasting and milling of Coffea Arabica and Coffea Robusta seeds, then brewed by forcing hot water under pressure through finely ground coffee toward the use of an appropriate machine.

But coffee is not just a plain physical process. Make the coffee is an art and especially a life style. Every country has its own particular way to prepare coffee and each one is convinced that other countries prepare just undrinkable coffees. As for example the American coffee that we Italians consider just as a tasteless slop. There are also many ways to drink the espresso, there are people who just drink the espresso from the bar, who spends many hours a day at the office coffee machine, who prefers just drink the coffee made at home with the coffee pot.

If coffee in general, imported from the South America, was drunk since 16th century, the first European coffee house opened in 1645. Since then the use of this beverage quickly spread first in England, but coffee house very soon became an ideal place for the birth and diffusion of liberal ideas and so they were attended by scholars, politics and philosophers, spreading the use in whole Europe.

Instead the espresso as we know it was developed in Milan in the early 20th century, thanks to the invention of the espresso machine, patented by Mr. Giuseppe Bezzera in 1902. The patent was then bought by Desiderio Pavoni who started, with his own enterprise, La Pavoni, in 1905, the mass production (one a day), in a small machine shop in Pavini street, in Milan. This was the first espresso machine for the coffee house, and it was called Ideale (ideal).

To this first machine, many others followed, from the domestic coffee pot to the coffee vending machines, that today have already become more like hot drinks machines. We can surely say this is a huge marketing development!

Today the global sector market is around 90.000 million dollars. Brazil alone produces almost one third of the whole coffee in the world. At world level, there are a lot of people concerned for what is one of the most traded goods, together with oil and steal. Periodically, the quantities of the harvests are really fluctuating, according to the meteorological condition and the prices fluctuations. 

Brazil is the world leader in production of green coffee, followed by Vietnam, Colombia and Indonesia. Following there are, with variable order according to the years, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, Ethiopia, India.

In any case coffee is always one of the world economy’s most traded and important goods.

Nobody will ever think to renounce to his coffee break, which could be at home, at work or waiting for the train, maybe together with a snack from the food vending machine. In every moment of our life we are grateful of the long road the coffee keeps cover.

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